Sbt and gradle, both are based on statically typed languages....but sbt has few advantages:
- better plugin support, specially autoplugins
- task creation and dependency management between tasks
- sbt specially suits scala projects in the sense that it supports incremental builds and most of the sbt itself is written in scala and sbt build definitions is written in scala
- sbt has interative shell support with many useful built-in tasks
- sbt default lifecycle is pretty useful and can get novice started with pretty less effort
